The Essential Ted Sizer

"Ted has a respect for others
that makes it very difficult for people to see him as an
enemy."

Paula Evans
The Annenberg Institute

In his ability to accept criticism with grace, even ‚ elan,
Ted Sizer is a lot like Horace Smith, his "nonfictional fictional"
English teacher at suburban Franklin High School who "during times of
duress is able to keep his balance and not let life get the better of
him." Horace, whom we first meet in Horace's Compromise, endures
trouble with calm circumspection, rising above petty squabbles to bring
bickering colleagues together. He's by nature a conciliator. Students
trust him and seek his counsel outside the classroom.

As goes Horace, so goes Sizer. Paula Evans, the director of
professional development at the Annenberg Institute and someone who has
taught classes with Sizer at Brown, says, "Some of the students would
characterize me as 'mom' and Ted as 'God.' They're almost reverential
in their respect for him. He has an open-door policy for everyone who
wants to talk with him, and he can actually carry on a conversation
with 150 students."

Sizer is an unusual public figure in that he seems to have no
enemies, even among those who strongly disagree with his views. For
this, Evans credits his ability to listen to ideas different from his
own. "It's not that Ted feels that all ideas are equal or that he's
about to change his stripes," she says. "It's rather that Ted has a
respect for others that makes it very difficult for people to see him
as an enemy. I've never, ever, heard him call anyone stupid. I think it
has to do with his sense of the human condition, his belief that he has
a basic responsibility to other people."

Patricia Wasley, an author and researcher for the Coalition of
Essential Schools, says, "Ted has an amazing ability to tolerate
criticism. It has to do with his inherent optimism. He allows people to
raise negative aspects because he feels they can be worked through.
He's just not self-protective as so many people are." She recalls a
meeting at which the conservative education critic and gadfly Chester
Finn attacked the coalition for its "softness." His invective made
everyone squirm but Sizer, who sat in a corner with an amused smile on
his face.

Yet as similar as Sizer and Horace may be in temperament, they have
different backgrounds. For starters, Horace is a creature of the public
school. When we first meet him in Horace's Compromise, he's 53
(about the age of Sizer at the time), an "old pro" who has spent 28
years trying to get his students to grapple with the likes of
Shakespeare. To make ends meet, he works part time at a family liquor
store. His daughter, a first-year associate at a law firm, out-earns
him. Everything about Horace's daily environment is classic public
school: the bells, the announcements over the public-address system,
the vinyl-covered sofas and chairs in the faculty lounge, the teacher
chitchat.

Sizer, on the other hand, is quintessentially prep, as befits
someone who has spent much of his life in elite boarding schools and
Ivy League universities. He has a way of looking tweedy even when he is
not wearing tweeds. He has been described as "Kennedyesque," which
isn't much of a stretch. He is erudite and charming and has a great
capacity for putting people at ease.

A self-described "faculty brat," Sizer is the son of a Yale
University art-history professor, the last of six children. He was born
in New Haven, Conn., but was raised on a family farm in northern New
England by his mother and a German refugee when his father went off to
serve in World War II. Later, after attending the Pomfret School, a
small boarding school in Connecticut, and then Yale, Sizer also served
in the military--during the Korean War. Stationed in Germany, he was an
artillery training officer. It was his first experience teaching, and
he learned something about the importance of high expectations. "The
idea that you could use an excuse for not learning was unthinkable,"
Sizer says. "No one would think of saying, 'Well, he doesn't speak much
English, only Spanish, so go easy on him,' or 'He doesn't know how to
add.'"

After his discharge, Sizer taught in Australia for a year and then
returned to the United States, enrolling at Harvard where he eventually
received a Ph.D. in education and American history. Sizer's thesis,
perhaps more than anything else, launched him on his current path. It
was on late 19th-century school reform in general and the work of the
Committee of Ten in particular.

"Make an argument on
philosophical grounds, and it won't get into the newspaper. Talk
about test scores or how many teenage mothers wear size 6 shoes,
and it will end up on page one."

Ted
Sizer

Chaired by Harvard President Charles Eliot, the Committee of Ten
released an influential report in 1893 arguing that high schools should
develop and discipline the minds of their students by focusing on
academic subject matter. Students, the committee stated, should take at
least four years of English and foreign language and three years each
of history, mathematics, and science. All students should take
college-preparatory coursework, even though the committee acknowledged
that only a small percentage would go on to higher education. The goal
was for all youngsters to be exposed to the same demanding subjects,
all taught in more or less the same way. "The argument in the report
itself is pedestrian," Sizer says. "It's not a sonorous, persuasive
argument."

The report included a chart of the ideal high school curriculum,
listing, with a watchmaker's precision, the subjects and the number of
periods per week each course should be taught. "What school people did
is take this chart and put it into place so that this thing called 'the
period' begins to reign," Sizer says. "A subject taught five periods a
week is supposedly more important than one taught three periods a
week."

The Committee of Ten had a double-edged goal: It wanted to promote
academic rigor, but, more important, it wanted to bring order to a
rapidly developing national school system lacking uniform standards.
The committee's report was, in essence, a war against chaos. But along
with the rage for order, Sizer asserts, came "the mechanizationof
schooling, the reduction of serious schooling to the mere passage of
time. They thought if you studied Latin five days a week, something
good will come out of it."

The legacy of the committee and its chart and periods, Sizer says,
is that no one in education today takes anything seriously unless
there's a number attached. "Make an argument on philosophical grounds,
and it won't get into the newspaper," he says. "Talk about test scores
or how many teenage mothers wear size 6 shoes, and it will end up on
Page One."

The experience of the Committee of Ten showed Sizer that the impact
of specific reforms is often far different than what is envisioned. The
committee had hoped to initiate a more intellectual approach to
schooling, but many schools, Sizer says, simply became "clones of the
committee's detailed report."

As far as Sizer is concerned, any blueprint for reform is almost
hopelessly contingent. The penthouse may end up looking like a basement
apartment, just as the committee's goal of rigor and standards ended up
as seat time. This is why Sizer has always insisted that teachers
should be involved in the creation of the blueprint; if it's handed
down to them, they'll treat it like a court summons. It is also why
Sizer is fearful of the current movement toward national education
standards.

After earning his Ph.D., Sizer became an assistant professor of
education at Harvard. Then in 1964, at the age of 31, he was
named--thanks to what he modestly characterizes as a "stroke of
fortune"--the dean of the Harvard graduate school of education. It was,
Sizer says, an extraordinary time; he shared the coffeepot with such
intellectual heavyweights as Daniel Moynihan and Nathan Glazer.

But toward the end of the '60s, Sizer was already thinking about
moving on. Being dean during that turbulent decade was exhausting.
Besides, he wanted to get out of the ivory tower and into the
trenches--that is, into a real school. Academic work couldn't
substitute for real experience. "I felt utterly spurious as a dean,"
Sizer says. "I'd get these phone calls from newspapers asking me what I
thought about 'x' or 'y' in schools. I was supposed to know, but I
didn't."

Sizer wanted to become a high school principal, in part because his
wife taught high school and his kids were about to enroll. "I had this
romantic idea about how our family would be going to high school
together," Sizer says. First he thought about becoming a public school
principal but found he lacked the appropriate credentials. So he did
the next best thing: He became headmaster of a private school--the
elite Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass.

For Sizer, knowing
a lot is never more than the first step. The real goal is for kids
to use resourcefully what they know, which requires a very
different kind of teaching.

While the academy had plenty of star teachers and precocious
students from prominent families, it was, according to Sizer, hardly
different from public schools in terms of structure and approach. "The
flaws in private and public schools are very similar," Sizer says. "One
thing about the private sector is how slavishly it copies the public.
Every 47 minutes the bell rings--hell, it's all the same. Private
enterprise, entrepreneurialism--baloney."

Sizer describes much of the teaching at Phillips as spectacular, but
spectacular in an old-fashioned way. "It was pretty much, 'Sit down,
and I'll tell you what you need to know.' It was about as good as that
mode gets. But there wasn't the expectation that the kids would have to
use any of what they were taught down the line. So the kids knew a lot
of things but couldn't necessarily use them. But boy, they knew a lot
of things in a wonderful way."

In thinking about school reform, Sizer has never been interested in
bringing the educational practices of Phillips Academy--if such a thing
were even possible--to the rest of the nation's schools. For Sizer,
knowing a lot is never more than the first step. The real goal is for
kids to use resourcefully what they know, which requires a different
kind of teaching--a teaching that puts the student on center stage.

Although Sizer may claim that private schools imitate the public, he
knows better than anyone that Phillips Academy kids have a key
advantage over almost all their public school counterparts: namely, a
smaller, more intimate school setting where teachers can come to know
all their students well. When he was mapping out what would become "the
nine principles" of the Coalition of Essential Schools, Sizer termed
this key quality "personalization."

A few of the nine principles, like aphorisms from a winning
political campaign, have entered the mainstream of educational
discourse: "less is more," "student as worker," "teacher as coach,"
"diploma by exhibition." But according to Arthur Powell, one of Sizer's
oldest friends and colleagues and the principal author of the 1985
book, The Shopping Mall High School, "personalization" is the
nucleus upon which the other principles cohere. Only if teachers get to
know their students well, reversing the anonymity that has
characterized the high school, can they address students' individual
strengths and weaknesses.

"The key to the whole coalition idea," Powell says, "is to get the
numbers down, to get adults who are models working closely with kids so
they can be impacted by something besides pop culture and the mass
media. We're in essence telling kids, 'You can't just sit in the back
of the classroom; we're going to treat you as an important person with
something to say.' The kid has to be visible, to do something, not just
be a spectator where he's watching someone else perform."

Vol. 16, Issue 14

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